Recent reviews by MDSVeritas

I'm having a lot of fun with this game so far. It's a pretty interesting mashup of a couple different genres: of course at the heart of it is the shop management, which has a nice bit of depth to it as it involves outfitting your shop with the tables, shelves, windows and flower pots, and pairing them with specific items you slowly accrue. You've got to know when to invest in a bigger shop, when to attract more customers, or when to subtly increase prices for certain items. This is also paired with elements of crafting, growing crops, and even some small clicker-game elements that don't outstay their welcome (e.g. try clicking the birds).

Complimenting this already interesting management side of things is the way you actually get the items you end up selling: by adventuring. This part of the game is crisply short and to the point; there's no need to worry about hour long dungeons or lengthy battles. Instead there's the refreshing twist that your character does the fighting all on their own, while your job as the player is bag management. This ends up getting into some Tetris-y moments of fitting oddly shaped items together by rotating them around and trying to save as much space as possible, all the while you're on the clock. There's even different shaped bags you can get which provide new and strange challenges as to how you pack away your items (some bags are bigger and square, while others may have strange and challenging shapes while giving you other perks).

And the glue holding these two sides of the entreprenurial endeavour is a time-management mechanic where opening the shop for a day or heading off adventuring will take up days in a precious week. So you've got to balance when you re-stock weapons, when you sell them off, and how you spend your money; you could save it to be ready to pay off increasing payments of a rather large debt, or take the gamble and use that money to level your character up to hit better dunegons and get more pricey loot, or buy new loot bags or other such gear.

While all of that may seem like a lot it actually comes together pretty neatly. After a few minutes I got the hang of the gameplay loop and it's been a blast since then. One thing I'll say is that the inviting, playful appearence of this game masks a pretty intense race against time that tests your skills with a good bit of difficulty. I died while adventuring or failed to make my payments more than a few times. While this was a bit frustrating at the time, it also forced me to delve deeper into the mechanics of the game. I appreciate that the game doesn't seem to want players to be able to spend carelessly or do a sloppy job of balancing adventuring and selling. It's a game that demands your attention and comprehension and rewards you for taking time to examine it and learn from it.

All in all I've been having a blast. I've failed more than a couple times but never unfairly, and the more I've died or missed my precious weekly payments the more I've come to understand all the cogs in motion at once here, and which ones I have to focus on at different times. I'm not there yet, but I aim to be a master shopkeep yet and I think it'll be a lot of fun getting there.